Thursday, February 13, 2014

Flappy Jam #First and Final - Game Complete + Post-Mortem

So towards the end of the Candy Jam someone decided we also needed a Flappy Jam in support of Dong Nguyen's decision to take down his hit mobile game Flappy Bird. Personally I didn't see the point... Candy Jam was about something I legitimately felt strongly about, but Flappy Jam didn't really seem to have a purpose and as much as I wanted to do as many jams as possible this year, I wouldn't have felt bad for skipping it.

Meanwhile, while checking out some of the other Candy Jam entries, I came across Twine. Twine is a tool for making old school text adventures in a web friendly format. Being a big fan of text adventures, I decided to make a point of checking it out at a later date. A couple of days after that I end up in a conversation with another game developer, bemoaning Flappy Bird's success. I was feeling cocky, so I bet him I could remake Flappy Bird in a Twine. One day later and here we are.

I don't really want to drag this game out too much so I'm also going to launch straight into the post-mortem in this post.

The Bad

The most horrible thing here from a game designer standpoint is that there are certain scenarios that can happen in this game that make continuing impossible. The way the "engine" works is if there's no pipes on the screen, it has a random chance of spawning a high gap pipe, a low gap pipe, or having another screen with no pipes. The high gap pipe only has 1 bird height that can pass through it, so if you can't get to the right position in time you can't get through. If the player gets 2 screens with no pipe and then a high gap pipe, it's impossible to get into the right position. I could've changed this, but I kind of felt like if there was more of a gap it would be way too easy to flap forever and the game was supposed to be near impossible anyway, so instead I added the easy low gap pipe to add some variety and make it seem like the game was a little more possible to play.

Twine is pretty good for what it's intended to be used for, but pretty limited for doing anything crazy out of the box. Originally I was just going to literally break every decision down and do a page each decision, but that seemed like madness. So then I started looking at drawing the game world textblock by textblock, but Twine doesn't like having nested code (i.e. if statements within if statements) so that got nixed.

Then I decided maybe to just have a single page that reacts differently depending on what variables you pass into it. This would've worked, except that my brain wasn't in the right place and did the wrong syntax all over the place. Retrospectively, if I did do this that way it would've made debugging a pain in the ass so I'm glad I didn't do it.

Eventually I ended up doing a different page for each possible bird/pipe combination, which seems excessive but didn't really take that long. The Twine editor has visual links between pages, which makes it really easy to check the gameplay flow. I ended up with something that looks a little like this:

It's pretty janky but it works, and that's what's important.

The Good

I got it done in about a day despite knowing nothing about Twine. I could've cheated and done a bunch of stuff in javascript, but I stuck to my guns. After I did settle on a methodology I was surprised at just how well it did work. It lacks animation and sound, but mechanically its about the equivalent of the mobile game.

I don't know if this is really good or just an indication of how popular Flappy Birds is, but the views on itch.io for this game have already surpassed the views for Scroll of Candy. So in that regard, 1 day of effort gets you more views than 1 week of effort. It could be though, that the nature of how Twine works means that it refreshes the screen and hence view count every action. I'd look into it but I couldn't be bothered.

The Ugly

Broken down really roughly, time was spent as such:
1/2 day - Working out how to use Twine
1/2 day - Manually editing ASCII art

Development-wise, I was playing this by ear because I had no idea what the capabilities of the engine would be.

And a Fistful of Dollars

I wouldn't continue any development on this game, not even if people wanted me to. I would however make some more stuff in Twine, and may do something at a future jam, depending on the topics.

About Big Stompy Robots

Big Stompy Robots makes kick ass video games (and other assorted things). So far they haven't officially released anything, but it'll happen soon. If you want to hear more about these things and how they're made, right here is the place to be. If not, chill out. Reading this stuff is entirely optional.